The theatre of life

RIGHT IN THE MIDDLE

Ebrahim Alkazi, Habib Tanvir, Bhisham Sahni, Girish Karnad, Manohar Singh, Ranjit Kapoor, Uttara Baokar, Safdar Hashmi, Naseeruddin Shah, Farooq Sheikh, Feroz Abbas Khan, Ratna Pathak Shah… all stalwarts of Indian theatre.

I could reel off many more names, some of them unsung, staging small productions relentlessly in obscure bylanes without much remuneration or recognition coming their way. Chronicling history, interpreting a slice of it, recording, reflecting and reverberating the lives and times in an attempt to show the society the mirror, they are our conscience keepers.

Unlike literature which is staid and is handicapped in its reach, for, it can only be accessed by the literate, theatre, accented by an audio-visual dimension, has much more penetration. It can accommodate our rich folk traditions, vibrant and alive in the hinterland across the landscape entertaining and educating the rural masses.

Katha-puran, Natak-nautanki, Ramleela, Raslila, Yakshagana, Lavani, Kathakali, Jatra, Geet Govind, Pandwani, Baul are all but a few of our remarkable oral traditions dynamically playing out from generation to generation through word of mouth without much of a written script. That makes them easy to be transmitted, even among the unlettered entertainers. However, at the same time, they run the risk of being abandoned and forgotten easily and thus lost forever.

I have always been charmed by this world of performing arts, its players and the world they inhabit, though I might be guilty of seeing it through rose-tinted glasses. Once upon a time, the National School of Drama was the temple of learning I aspired to train at. That made me apply on a whim at the theatre department at Panjab University (considered a stepping stone to the former) along with at the mass communication department. Having cleared the written exam at both the places, I dared not take the practicals at the former, for I had never set foot on stage for any performance, that is, albeit for a few school annual day functions.

I promptly got myself enrolled at the latter. “You ought to have been the ‘heroine of the stage’,” exclaimed an acquaintance, also a theatre buff.

“Huh,” I remained clueless. “Ranganayaki, your traditional name means just that,” she explained. My paternal granny answered to that name. And I was supposed to inherit it, in consonance with a tradition prevalent in many communities south of the Vindayas. But my parents decided otherwise and gave me a “modern” name, for which I was grateful to them as I was embarrassed by the old name at one point in time.

What a serendipity! Now having understood the importance of it after all these years, I desire to be one in my next birth, if there’s one.